Well, if the guy in the article is looking at funds and banking no wonder he doesn't have a job! One has to look where the jobs are, not where they aren't.
Pharmaceuticals if you did chemistry. And I'm sure EE people don't have a hard time finding work.
Or do you mean people who major in things like classics and French? I guess they can be...teachers. Of people who study classics and French and will be able to go on and become...teachers.
I think it's important for techies to get a little exposure to humanities during their undergrad degrees, but I don't really see the point of spending four years studying only humanities.
Or they could be translators. They could teach their native language to people whose native language is the one they've learned. They could end up as authors or writing the marketing copy to sell your software in France or on any number of non-self-referential career paths. There are useful places in this world for people who didn't major in applied sciences, too.
Part of the problem is that too many people are going to college. (Why does a bank teller need a college degree?) And then when they have a degree they expect a job that pays very well and offers full benefits. There are jobs for college graduates, but they may not be "dream jobs."
The problem is that college is too accessible. Kids are expected to go to college no matter what, there is no longer even a question of whether or not someone needs a college degree, they are expected to go, no matter how crappy a school they get into.
And for kids they aren't making the decisions with their own money. If they had to pony up their own 30-40K, instead of getting "free money" from loans, they'd think twice, whether or not that Communications degree from some crappy 3rd rate college with no name is worth 60K.
Certainly true. Capitalism has yet to find an efficient way to reallocate human capital despite its obvious success at allocating other resources. It's (relatively) easy to make a rational decision to quit investing in oil in favor of biotech if you think that industry will perform better. But it's hard to say to workers who've spent their entire lives developing skills particular to an industry that they should just go and find a job in an industry that needs more workers. Retraining is hard. Relocating is hard. People are a lot less mobile than capital. Tearing down restrictions on immigration is one way to make people more mobile thereby allowing for more efficient allocation of human resources.
But it's hard to say to workers who've spent their entire lives developing skills particular to an industry that they should just go and find a job in an industry that needs more workers. Retraining is hard. Relocating is hard. People are a lot less mobile than capital.
Is this a worthwhile justification to keep investing in the old industry at the expense of the new?
It is hard to say people need to go learn new skills, but it is harder for me to say that the main reason we aren't adopting something new is because the long-term benefits of adoption are outweighed by the relatively short-term pain of a group of displaced laborers. The people who experience the short-term pain may themselves benefit from this new technology being adopted.
I get the sense a part of this is due to the sentiment that I've noticed that employers owe continuing retention to their employees. It is why layoffs carry such a social stigma. It created this sense the people should not have to retrain, and that they should not have to relocate. At the extreme, they shouldn't even have to change employers to do the same task. It would suck for me to have to do the same. I see it as a risk of living in an economy based on always pushing technology forward, which is what capitalism will tend to do. I've realized that no one else is responsible for making my life easier, whatever the expense.
There is also this sentiment that skills do not cross-pollinate at all, and that current skills are all that matter. This is perhaps a broken bias on the part of the employer that skill set X now matters more than the ability to learn skill set Y,Z quickly in the future. This may be a product of thinking of oneself as an "X specialist" foremost, rather than identifying what conceptual basis one draws on to become an "X specialist".
As for tearing down immigration laws, that only solves part of the problem. You still have to train someone, picking from a pool of people who have not been trained in the industry that came before will be just as hard, if not harder, because they don't have the prior skills to draw connections from.
Why is this surprising? Why should college degree imply ability to find a job? Alot of my classmates appear to do little more than drink + party. I know for a fact that I would not hire them. Why would others?
If anything this seems to show that the general market has finally started realizing how worthless a college degree is.
Umm, not sure about that ... I'm not saying college kids don't party too much or that degrees aren't worthless to some degree.
But I think it's clear that this statistic shows that there's more competition for fewer jobs.
At the very least, a college degree isn't worthless if it's required to enter the field you wish to work in. Browse Monster.com and see how many finance and/or engineering jobs don't require a college degree.
From your tone, I'm gathering you have problems with people who equate a college degree with skills/ability ... you're more than welcome to feel that way, but I don't think you're proving such a consensus has caused the drop in graduates w/ jobs.
A lot of advertisements claim to require a college degree even if the company is perfectly willing to hire qualified applicants without one. They do this to cut down the number of applications they have to wade through. The type of dropout that they're actually willing to hire will probably apply anyway, regardless of what the ad says, and it weeds out a lot of chaff that isn't qualified and is just looking for a job, any job.
Not to mention that a lot of grads may never have worked a day in their lives. I knew a lot of people who had tons of extracurriculars but never actually worked at a real job. Having previous work experience, even if it's a part time menial job, is necessary in finding a job straight out of school.
Having previous work experience, even if it's a part time menial job, is necessary in finding a job straight out of school.
Most people ask for prior work experience because what that prior work experience teaches them something they can then apply to future jobs. That or they're just ageist, but that's not as interesting.
I do agree with you that it prior work experience, wherever it might be, is necessary.
However, I think it is wrongheaded that it is necessary; and, yes, I realize how defiant this sounds, but I’m going to try to back it up.
The first question I would like to ask is this person at a menial job learned that someone who didn't have a menial job failed to learn. Is this lesson the person who worked the menial job important? That largely depends on what the current position is all about. If it is a job that requires creativity, and a large amount of independent action, I don't see what the menial job provided them that would help them. If the job where there is no latitude, and requires following a strict process, the most you'll get out of that experience is that the person was able to learn some strict process in the past and stick with it enough to be productive. This is weak information.
You could argue that it instills in a person a strong work ethic, but they either have that or they don't. Even if they do, it may not be enough to overcome the doldrums of a menial, repetitive job, and they might become extremely bored and disenchanted. Given greater creative latitude, they might do quite well, and nothing about the menial job experience would tell you whether they will or won't.
You could also argue that it’s more about learning how to work with a team, and within an organization. These both can be learned from a variety of situations, from extracurriculars to whatever. The aspect of this you might learn specific to employment is how to accept an organization as it is, and work within the confines of that. I think the acceptance of this has to do more with personality than with experience. I’ve been working within hierarchical organizations off and on through my years, and they still annoy me. I don’t think more years will change that.
As for general work experience, it is a relatively weak indicator. I'm not saying people don't use it, but I am saying that it does not correlate well to skills and ability. Like a degree, it is just a pointer to years where the person was supposedly doing some particular task. They might not have been, or they might have been doing it just well enough to avoid termination. They might have been the star of the department. Who knows. Years do not translate into relative ability or talent, and there is data to back this up. As a quality test, it sucks; but it is easy, and is considered enough of a "best practice" that no one will get fired for hiring an employee on that basis at most large companies, especially the ones that care more about decorum than productivity.
Passion and talent are much better indicators. But neither of these are evident from years of working experience. Someone who is six months in to their first job may outperform someone who’s been doing the work for over twenty years. And someone who has twenty years may not care worth a damn about what they do. It is possible to test for these independent of years of experience, and I think a far more worthwhile way of finding someone capable.
And sorry for the rant, this bit of default hiring wisdom has always annoyed me.
Maybe my describing prior work experience as "necessary" was a bit of a hyperbole for all employment situations. I agree with everything you said and I also appreciate you talking about the counter-points to your arguments.
However, despite the feelings that prior experience is not always great criterion for selecting great employees, the reality remains that it's usually necessary for selecting adequate employees. For most grads an employer may be making an investment in the grad acquiring the skills they need on the job and if they have prior work experience that could help indicate that candidate is more likely to acquire said skills than another candidate with no work experience.
Since I am both a relatively recent grad (2007) and have also had a number of different types of jobs since I was about 14 I have a few observations:
* Many college students are grossly unprepared to face looking for a job. From resumes to professional courtesy it seems that many students just don't know where to start or what their prospective employers are looking for in candidates.
* Getting a job is basically a sales pitch. Your resume and interview has to convince the employer that you are right for the job. Those with poor presentation and preparation skills will suffer. Even if they are passionate and creative, if their resume doesn't convey this then they will probably be passed over for a position.
* Many recent grads are unwilling to accept a job in a different line of work than in their college concentrations.
* Some recent grads come across as pompous or condescending due to either too much exuberance or having a big fish in a small pond attitude. Like prior experience, academic success is not necessarily an indicator of being a great employee or easy to work with.
* Personally, many of the recent grads (and regular employees) I know who have a good work ethic have worked menial or unsatisfying jobs at some point. This may be a self-selection bias to do difficult or different things, but I still feel that those who have either humbled themselves working a hard job they didn't need financially or worked and excelled at an unsatisfying job to provide for themselves are usually more cooperative, more determined, and have all around better character. I do acknowledge that these qualities can certainly be found in those who have not worked jobs prior to graduating.
* Some people are just the clock-in clock-out types who simply are not passionate about their work and/or are unhappy with it, and for these types of people prior work experience is a good indicator of an acceptable but not necessarily a stellar employee. A passionate employee that loves their work is probably an outlier to whom the normal metrics of employee selection may not apply or who would far and above fulfill hiring criteria for prior experience.
Presumably, the point behind college is to do more than drink, party, and have a sheet of paper that shows some baseline amount was learned through the drunken haze. What that baseline is, and how much the person is toeing it, isn't really obvious with just a official sheet of paper.
I do hope, however, that the market is not overzealous in what it dismisses. The degree itself might be nearly worthless; however, the path to the degree can yield surprisingly different results depending on the person and whether they cared more about the journey or the destination, be that a degree or a job. For my part, I couldn't care less about the sheet of paper I was given. The knowledge I gained, and the interesting and insightful conversations I had, made the process of getting the degree far from worthless.
Hmm, I'm not sure I believe that. At least, the statistic is designed to be alarming. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelors degree hovers between 2 and 4% - over decades.
Thanks for the useful perspective provided by that chart.
To set the scene for the original story: It's from abcnews (i.e., =/= in depth analysis); it cites a few examples; rather than documenting any extended period without a job it discusses graduates who did not have jobs already secured upon graduation; it quotes complaints that people were not able to get jobs of their first choice; it is from abcnews' business section: and so may be seeking to discuss the increasing difficulties of people with traditional business degrees looking for traditional business/money-management jobs at a time when banks are being shuttered.
Conclusion: headline and story are link-bait journalism (one "field" that may still have openings ;).
What about computer science specifically ? In Belgium, we're at 100% of cs students getting a job, most often even before they graduated (they get employed before-hand).
30 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] threadOr do you mean people who major in things like classics and French? I guess they can be...teachers. Of people who study classics and French and will be able to go on and become...teachers.
I think it's important for techies to get a little exposure to humanities during their undergrad degrees, but I don't really see the point of spending four years studying only humanities.
And for kids they aren't making the decisions with their own money. If they had to pony up their own 30-40K, instead of getting "free money" from loans, they'd think twice, whether or not that Communications degree from some crappy 3rd rate college with no name is worth 60K.
Has something else found that efficient way?
Is this a worthwhile justification to keep investing in the old industry at the expense of the new?
It is hard to say people need to go learn new skills, but it is harder for me to say that the main reason we aren't adopting something new is because the long-term benefits of adoption are outweighed by the relatively short-term pain of a group of displaced laborers. The people who experience the short-term pain may themselves benefit from this new technology being adopted.
I get the sense a part of this is due to the sentiment that I've noticed that employers owe continuing retention to their employees. It is why layoffs carry such a social stigma. It created this sense the people should not have to retrain, and that they should not have to relocate. At the extreme, they shouldn't even have to change employers to do the same task. It would suck for me to have to do the same. I see it as a risk of living in an economy based on always pushing technology forward, which is what capitalism will tend to do. I've realized that no one else is responsible for making my life easier, whatever the expense.
There is also this sentiment that skills do not cross-pollinate at all, and that current skills are all that matter. This is perhaps a broken bias on the part of the employer that skill set X now matters more than the ability to learn skill set Y,Z quickly in the future. This may be a product of thinking of oneself as an "X specialist" foremost, rather than identifying what conceptual basis one draws on to become an "X specialist".
As for tearing down immigration laws, that only solves part of the problem. You still have to train someone, picking from a pool of people who have not been trained in the industry that came before will be just as hard, if not harder, because they don't have the prior skills to draw connections from.
If anything this seems to show that the general market has finally started realizing how worthless a college degree is.
But I think it's clear that this statistic shows that there's more competition for fewer jobs.
At the very least, a college degree isn't worthless if it's required to enter the field you wish to work in. Browse Monster.com and see how many finance and/or engineering jobs don't require a college degree.
From your tone, I'm gathering you have problems with people who equate a college degree with skills/ability ... you're more than welcome to feel that way, but I don't think you're proving such a consensus has caused the drop in graduates w/ jobs.
signed,
A college dropout
Most people ask for prior work experience because what that prior work experience teaches them something they can then apply to future jobs. That or they're just ageist, but that's not as interesting.
I do agree with you that it prior work experience, wherever it might be, is necessary.
However, I think it is wrongheaded that it is necessary; and, yes, I realize how defiant this sounds, but I’m going to try to back it up.
The first question I would like to ask is this person at a menial job learned that someone who didn't have a menial job failed to learn. Is this lesson the person who worked the menial job important? That largely depends on what the current position is all about. If it is a job that requires creativity, and a large amount of independent action, I don't see what the menial job provided them that would help them. If the job where there is no latitude, and requires following a strict process, the most you'll get out of that experience is that the person was able to learn some strict process in the past and stick with it enough to be productive. This is weak information.
You could argue that it instills in a person a strong work ethic, but they either have that or they don't. Even if they do, it may not be enough to overcome the doldrums of a menial, repetitive job, and they might become extremely bored and disenchanted. Given greater creative latitude, they might do quite well, and nothing about the menial job experience would tell you whether they will or won't.
You could also argue that it’s more about learning how to work with a team, and within an organization. These both can be learned from a variety of situations, from extracurriculars to whatever. The aspect of this you might learn specific to employment is how to accept an organization as it is, and work within the confines of that. I think the acceptance of this has to do more with personality than with experience. I’ve been working within hierarchical organizations off and on through my years, and they still annoy me. I don’t think more years will change that.
As for general work experience, it is a relatively weak indicator. I'm not saying people don't use it, but I am saying that it does not correlate well to skills and ability. Like a degree, it is just a pointer to years where the person was supposedly doing some particular task. They might not have been, or they might have been doing it just well enough to avoid termination. They might have been the star of the department. Who knows. Years do not translate into relative ability or talent, and there is data to back this up. As a quality test, it sucks; but it is easy, and is considered enough of a "best practice" that no one will get fired for hiring an employee on that basis at most large companies, especially the ones that care more about decorum than productivity.
Passion and talent are much better indicators. But neither of these are evident from years of working experience. Someone who is six months in to their first job may outperform someone who’s been doing the work for over twenty years. And someone who has twenty years may not care worth a damn about what they do. It is possible to test for these independent of years of experience, and I think a far more worthwhile way of finding someone capable.
And sorry for the rant, this bit of default hiring wisdom has always annoyed me.
Maybe my describing prior work experience as "necessary" was a bit of a hyperbole for all employment situations. I agree with everything you said and I also appreciate you talking about the counter-points to your arguments.
However, despite the feelings that prior experience is not always great criterion for selecting great employees, the reality remains that it's usually necessary for selecting adequate employees. For most grads an employer may be making an investment in the grad acquiring the skills they need on the job and if they have prior work experience that could help indicate that candidate is more likely to acquire said skills than another candidate with no work experience.
Since I am both a relatively recent grad (2007) and have also had a number of different types of jobs since I was about 14 I have a few observations:
* Many college students are grossly unprepared to face looking for a job. From resumes to professional courtesy it seems that many students just don't know where to start or what their prospective employers are looking for in candidates.
* Getting a job is basically a sales pitch. Your resume and interview has to convince the employer that you are right for the job. Those with poor presentation and preparation skills will suffer. Even if they are passionate and creative, if their resume doesn't convey this then they will probably be passed over for a position.
* Many recent grads are unwilling to accept a job in a different line of work than in their college concentrations.
* Some recent grads come across as pompous or condescending due to either too much exuberance or having a big fish in a small pond attitude. Like prior experience, academic success is not necessarily an indicator of being a great employee or easy to work with.
* Personally, many of the recent grads (and regular employees) I know who have a good work ethic have worked menial or unsatisfying jobs at some point. This may be a self-selection bias to do difficult or different things, but I still feel that those who have either humbled themselves working a hard job they didn't need financially or worked and excelled at an unsatisfying job to provide for themselves are usually more cooperative, more determined, and have all around better character. I do acknowledge that these qualities can certainly be found in those who have not worked jobs prior to graduating.
* Some people are just the clock-in clock-out types who simply are not passionate about their work and/or are unhappy with it, and for these types of people prior work experience is a good indicator of an acceptable but not necessarily a stellar employee. A passionate employee that loves their work is probably an outlier to whom the normal metrics of employee selection may not apply or who would far and above fulfill hiring criteria for prior experience.
I do hope, however, that the market is not overzealous in what it dismisses. The degree itself might be nearly worthless; however, the path to the degree can yield surprisingly different results depending on the person and whether they cared more about the journey or the destination, be that a degree or a job. For my part, I couldn't care less about the sheet of paper I was given. The knowledge I gained, and the interesting and insightful conversations I had, made the process of getting the degree far from worthless.
http://verifiable.com/charts/1359
To set the scene for the original story: It's from abcnews (i.e., =/= in depth analysis); it cites a few examples; rather than documenting any extended period without a job it discusses graduates who did not have jobs already secured upon graduation; it quotes complaints that people were not able to get jobs of their first choice; it is from abcnews' business section: and so may be seeking to discuss the increasing difficulties of people with traditional business degrees looking for traditional business/money-management jobs at a time when banks are being shuttered.
Conclusion: headline and story are link-bait journalism (one "field" that may still have openings ;).